Agent training programme

Agent training programme

1
Overview

Training is essential to launching and maintaining a high performing support operation. It involves identifying trainers, creating training assets, delivering the training, and testing the understanding of your agents.

Training is not just a one time activity for new agents. It requires a continuous investment to keep up with changes to your business, internal policies and customer care processes.

Key considerations:

Decide whether you need a dedicated training team or resource

Define the scope of training activities

Decide whether and what training activities to outsource to vendors

Time required to develop training materials if launching new operations

Essential resources:

Subject matter experts to develop your training assets

Trainers to deliver the training

A Learning Management System (LMS) or other means of administering tests and tracking certifications

2
Creating a training team

Your need for a dedicated training team or resource will be determined by the scale of your customer care operations across the following dimensions:

Complexity - range of products or services requiring support by specialised skill sets

Scale - number of locations supported and the need to adapt to local culture or languages

Related responsibilities - complexity of managing internal knowledge bases such as troubleshooting guides and help centres

The best approach for staffing and scaling your training team is to leverage your top agent talent. Identify top performers to develop your training assets on a full or part time basis. Where possible, these agents should meet the following characteristics:

Deep knowledge of your business and customer care processes

Passionate about teaching and developing the capabilities of others

A confident presenter with exceptional oral and written communication skills

Ability to follow precise instructions and processes

As part of their role, they will have the following responsibilities:

Creating new training assets and refreshing stale material

Training content management

Delivering training to new joiners and as needed

Developing and administering tests for agent certifications

Supporting ongoing learning and sharing best practices

3
Developing training assets

Begin by defining the purpose and scope of your agent training programme. This should include:

Training new agents

Ongoing agent development

Adapting to changes in your business, policies or internal processes

Once your scope has been determined, keep the following points in mind when developing your training assets:

Use standardised templates - consistent formatting looks more polished and is easier to follow by your agents

Delivery method - consider the most effective medium for delivering your training (e.g. video may not work well if agents cannot easily listen to audio)

4
Certifying agents

Certifications are a great way to quantify training effectiveness and provide a career progression path for your agents. They help to identify knowledge gaps, compare agent performance and identify your top talent.

When developing and implementing certifications, we recommend thinking about the following objectives:

Manage co-employment risks (where applicable) by ensuring that vendors deliver training to their own agents

At Google, we have found the “train the trainer” delivery model to be highly effective. In fact, 80% of our internal training sessions are delivered through an employee-to-employee network called “g2g” (Googler-to-Googler).

This process starts by identifying skilled resources with a passion for sharing knowledge and developing others. Enable them to effectively share their experience by deploying a train the trainer programme with the following components:

Approaches for soliciting feedback from training attendees, evaluating the effectiveness of training sessions and making targeted improvements

Identifying gaps in agent knowledge and developing business cases for new training sessions

Ability to proactively develop and deploy new training content, including a mixture of text, visual and practical components, to suit different learning styles

The “train the trainer” model ensures your training is tailored to the needs of your organisation and provides opportunities for your more experienced agents to advance their careers. More information on this approach can be found on our re:Work site.

6
Onboarding new agents

Special consideration should be given to your onboarding training. This should be designed to integrate new hires within your organisation and instil your brand values. The following components should be considered:

Goals - Having standardised goals on a daily and weekly basis provides a consistent basis for assessing agent performance. This allows you to make early interventions to ensure the quality and consistency of your customer care agents. It also provides a more structured career pathway for your agents, which can help to increase engagement and lower attrition levels

Mock tickets - Classroom training and internal documentation are a great way to get your customer care agents up to speed. However, there is no match for hands on experience. Previous customer care issues should be identified and assigned as mock cases to new agents. This allows new joiners to hone their practical skills in a safe environment

Supervision - Agents should be given additional support as they ramp up in their roles. This involves controlling the contact volumes they initially handle under the supervision of trainers, quality assurance specialists or other experienced agents. This helps to ensure your agents align with your brand and are comfortable using internal tools to resolve customer issues